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A few months ago, I wrote a blog post on the availability, or lack thereof, of sacraments for the homebound, titled Have Sacraments, Will Travel. After writing that post, I searched for an appropriate image to illustrate it. I settled on a photo of two pairs of hands, both female, one pair of hands placing the Eucharist into the obviously older hands of the other. Click on the link to that...

I usually write blog posts late in the evening on Sundays so that they can "go live" for the public first thing Monday morning. Recently though, I had spent the weekend battling the flu and wanted to get to bed early. But I had yet to write a blog post and could not think of anything to write about. Desperate for an idea, I threw up a bleg on my Facebook page, asking Friends:

I recently received a couple of apologetics inquiries that may not seem related on the surface, but that I believe are suggestive of a common problematic approach to the Mass. The first was about the propriety of Christmas pageants in church. The inquirer was very obviously put off by the common custom of small children acting out the Christmas story for the benefit of parishioners, and wanted to know if this kind of spectacle was appropriate in a church dedicated to the worship of God:...

I'm not a person who naturally thrives in silence. During Lent, I have a hard time keeping the radio turned off in my car for the ten-minute drive to work. It is rather amazing then how annoyed I can become with unnecessary noise before and after Mass. And if the questions on the subject that the apologists get at Catholic Answers are any indication, many Catholics are disturbed by unnecessary noise at Mass. Here is a representative example:

I was flipping through the National Catholic Reporter recently and paused when I came to the letters to the editor (July 18–31). While NCR is a good source of reporting on Catholic affairs, its editorial slant very much leans left, and the readership often reflects that perspective. Sometimes the letters can be quite entertaining, and this time was no exception—at first glance, anyway.